Emc Corporation

John E Haynes, Jr

Jeffrey Alan Brown

Robert C Solomon

George M Ericson

Adam J Hutchinson

A processing unit is configured to establish a driver relationship between a network interface driver and a network interface device, the network interface device being configured to carry out multiple functions through the operating system. The processing unit is also configured to associate the network interface driver with a first driver of the operating system to provide a first function pathway between the network interface device and the first driver of the operating system through the network interface driver. The processing unit is also configured to associate the network interface driver with a second driver of the operating system to provide a second function pathway between the network interface device and the second driver of the operating system through the network interface driver. The first function pathway and the second function pathway allow the network interface device to carry out the multiple functions through the operating system.

Method and apparatus for interfacing an operating system with a network interface device

There is disclosed apparatus and methodology for enhancing computer system data transfer when writing to network attached storage systems employing FC-2 fibrechannel protocol by dynamically reconfiguring a fibrechannel switch in response to map/unmap command controls issued by a disk drive aggregator. The reconfiguration involves fabrication of a dynamic map table having sets of fibrechannel FC-2 header fields and their corresponding new or proxy destination IDs (which correspond to the switch's output ports), and fabrication of both an input frame header buffer for temporary storage purposes and a frame header field selector (which can be a frame header mask) containing only relevant information. The input frame header is temporarily stored in the buffer and the field selector is used to obtain a &ldquo;distilled&rdquo; input header which is compared with the dynamic map table of stored header fields to obtain a match. If one of the sets of header fields matches the distilled input header, its corresponding proxy destination or source ID is substituted into the corresponding FC-2 input frame header's destination ID field, whereby write command data transfers are accomplished between host computer and a particular disk drive directly, avoiding the aggregator and latency otherwise introduced by the aggregator. Similar disclosure is provided for read command data.

Growing community of inventors

South Weymouth, MA, United States of America

John E Haynes, Jr